Over the last few weeks, 13 artists have been at work in the Park East Corridor. It’s the area just north of downtown where a freeway spur was demolished, and now might be described by some as an “urban wasteland”.
IN:SITE, a local group that promotes temporary public installations, hopes placing art in unexpected spots among the vacant lots, will inspire people to see the area in a new way.
Most of the artists have crafted more traditional installations, such as sculpture and a chain-link fence decorated with colorful bits of fabric.
We meet a young woman who’s taking a more unique approach.
Sarah Luther says she used to cruise occasionally through the neighborhood on her bicycle, but didn’t really study the Park East Corridor landscape until last winter, when she was invited to participate in the public art project. The Kansas City Art Institute graduate was given the freedom to create whatever she wanted.
“I didn’t want to just have like a sculpture, I wanted something to bring people into the space,” Luther says.
There’s an ethereal, sort of Peter Pan, air about the young artist’s work. Once she arranged fallen leaves “just so” in a park. Then there was the urban picnic.
“I made paper grass and set us up like on a median in this parking lot and so people who were walking by were welcome to stop, like a basket of free apples, and have a picnic with me for however long they’d like,” Luther says.
Luther’s approach to the Park East challenge is to interest people in the corridor – an area that might appear anything but interesting. She fashioned a souvenir stand of plastic pipes and pegboard, held together with screws and PVC cement. The stand is stocked with abandoned stuff Luther picked up around the neighborhood - remnants of a wall clock, a book of matches, a reflector that used to be attached to a car.
“I usually am on the corner of Water and Knapp but I can move pretty much anywhere I like. It’s on wheels and I tend to just take things from it and run them out to people in their cars,’ Luther says. “And you give them away,” I ask.
“I give them away, but usually people don’t take them but I always offer them up as free artifacts from the Park East Corridor,” Luther says.
The day I stop by, Luther’s portable kiosk is parked at 3rd & Juneau. She waves to motorists as they head west into the early evening sun. Some wave back, others appear confused.
One man, named Samuel, walks by and chats with Luther. He’s about to head off to a class at MATC.
“Have you seen this souvenir stand before today,” I ask.
“No,” Samuel says.
“What do you think of it,” I ask.
“Well, it’s original plus, right um, she has her own style of what she wants to do, you know what I’m saying? And I got this piece from her,” Samuel says.
It’s one of several postcards Luther created. This one is a snapshot of stones that carpet a nearby empty lot. She chose one of those vacant spots, at the eastern most and highest point of the corridor, to stage another performance piece. It’s her version of Sunset Theater.
Luther invites the audience to sit in chairs she borrowed from a nearby church. A string trio performs an overture of sorts.
“And then there’s the real performance,” Luther says.
You might have guessed it - the audience watches the sun dip and set in the western horizon. Luther says about 50 people attended the premier performance a couple of weeks ago.
“There was a huge mix of people and so some people knew what to expect and were like talking. The people who were sitting behind me had just kind of met and they were kind of having first date conversation and just really getting to know one each other, which was sweet and talking about the event. But then there were some other people who were talking about how they were confused as to what was going on. And at one point, one woman went up to the concession stand with her granddaughter and said, what’s the performance, what are we supposed to be watching? And the person up there just responded, the sunset, you’re just supposed to be watching the sunset. And, are you kidding me?! Like, are you serious,” Luther says.
Luther calls the grandmother’s reaction “performance art at its most sublime” – elements that are totally out of her control.
“People that will come in and completely change the way the event goes, based on their personal reactions to it, so you just never have any clue exactly how things are going to turn out," Luther says..
You might spot Sarah Luther somewhere in the Park East Corridor, guiding a tour or waving to commuters. A week from now, she’ll eagerly be expecting the unexpected - at the Sunset Theater finale.
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